Saturday, June 05, 2010

Vpike.com (short for "Virtual Turnpike") is an interesting site that you give an address to and it shows you the street view for the address. You can move up and down the street, turn and look at things across the street, and so on. Try it out on where you live now, places you used to live, and even old family homes.

Well, there was sun, anyway.... Late yesterday afternoon, we had blue skies, which continued until maybe 2:30 this afternoon. It was actually warm, too, which was a pleasant change. The plants are enjoying it very much: some of the marigold seeds have sprouted and I saw at least eight sunflower seeds breaking the surface this morning. I figure there will be more later today.

Had a lovely time at the First Friday Art Walk last night with Jim & Beth Weldy and their grandniece Caitlyn (who's in town from Tennessee).

Back to messing with the scanner, trying to get it to install correctly under WinXP SP3. Bleah.

Monday, May 31, 2010

Yesterday, we went out to Jerry's and picked up 4 more faux terra cotta pots, and a couple large bags of potting soil, and some more tomato plants, and a blueberry bush. Turns out the pots were slightly smaller than the ones we already had, so I just put one tomato plant in each one. We had a pair of dill plants that hadn't fit in anything (which is why we'd gone to buy more pots in the first place) and they went into two of the 1-gallon pots left over from the tomato plants. And then I planted nasturtium seeds in a bunch of the barrels and pots (there's always room for more nasturtiums) and created starts with a package of Velvet Queen sunflower seeds and "Sparky" French marigolds.

Jewel nasturtiums

Velvet Queen sunflowers

"Sparky" French marigolds

I looked closely at the plants yesterday and today and everyone seems happy. Most of the plants are showing new leaves, there are additional flower buds on a couple of the big tomatoes, the fuschias have larger flower buds, and the nemesia and dill are spreading out vigorously.

About Me

I live in Fircrest, WA, married, 5 stepchildren who I'm mighty fond of, and 6 granddaughters who I extremely fond of. I write books, magazine articles, white papers, documentation, online help... most anything, even buttons for a button company. I've published about 8 million, which is quite a pile.

We have two cats, a 17yo tabby/Siamese mix and an 18-pound black cat who's fairly obnoxious.

The Babe and I play a lot of gin rummy together at restaurants and we bowl. All this may sound disgustingly humdrum, but I'm just giving you the few points of contact with a consensual normalcy amidst a backdrop of periodic chaos and excitement with travel, conferences, and cruises to exotic foreign shores.